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We are moving all of our site and company news into a single blog for Sports-Reference.com. We'll tag all Basketball-Reference content, so you can quickly and easily find the content you want.

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You may have noticed that I added something called "SRS" to the team and league pages. SRS stands for Simple Rating System, and I stole the idea from my colleague at Pro-Football-Reference.com, Doug Drinen (who probably stole it from someone else). Anyway, Doug has written a really nice explanation of the system, so rather than reinvent the wheel I'll ask you to read Doug's primer. OK, go ahead...

Back? Good. One thing I really like about the SRS is that the ratings have a very nice interpretation. For example, here are the top five teams in the NBA (based on the SRS) in 2006-07:

Let's use the Spurs as an example. The Spurs defeated their opponents by an average margin of 8.43 points. However, their opponents were, on average, 0.08 points worse than average. After adjusting for their schedule, we estimate that San Antonio was 8.43 - 0.08 = 8.35 points better than average.

Comparing one team to another is very easy. The Spurs rating last season was 8.35. The Cleveland Cavaliers, the team they beat in the NBA Finals, had a rating of 3.33. So the SRS leads us to believe that the Spurs were 8.35 - 3.33 = 5.02 points better than the Cavs last season. If we assume a 3-point home-court advantage, then the system would have favored the Spurs by 2.02 points in Cleveland and by 8.02 points in San Antonio. (It's interesting to note that in their four-game sweep of the Cavs, the Spurs won by an average of 10 points in San Antonio and 2 points in Cleveland.)

Some interesting lists can be made using the SRS. For example, here are the top teams based on the SRS along with the league champion for each of the BAA/NBA's past 61 seasons:

The 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks had the highest SRS of all time, 11.91 in 1970-71. The Bucks went 66-16 in the regular season (with a record point differential of 11.6 points per game) and won the NBA title, losing just two games in the playoffs. (It should be noted that three expansion teams debuted in the 1970-71 season.)

(Note: This article was inspired by a similar article written by Bill James on Bill James Online. James used Win Shares in his analysis, but I decided to take a slightly different route.)

Who is the best player in the NBA? I don't necessarily mean statistically, but rather the general consensus. One way to measure this is to look at MVP voting. While the best player may not win the MVP award every year, I think it is reasonable to assume that a player who has received significant MVP support over a period of years is a candidate for the title of best player in the NBA. We can measure MVP support by looking at something called award shares. An award share is simply award points won by the player divided by the maximum number of award points. Let me give you an example. In 2006-07, Dirk Nowitzki won 1138 points in the MVP voting. Had he received every first place vote, Nowitzki would have won 1290 points, so his award share is 1138 / 1290 = 0.882. Now that we have a way to quantify a player's voting support, we'll need to come up with a way to measure his established value in a given season. I decided to use the following formula:

The MVP award was first handed out following the 1955-56 season, so let's start with 1959 (this gives us four season of voting data for each year) and use the method outlined above to determine the greatest player in the NBA for each year.

The first winner is …

1959 Bob Pettit .453

Bob Pettit seems like a reasonable choice for the first best player. From 1955-56 through 1958-59 Pettit finished 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 1st in the MVP voting. Pettit also managed a 3rd place finish in 1959-60, but it wasn't enough to hold off the storm that was coming behind him.

Bill Russell took over the throne following the 1959-60 season and held it for the next seven years. During that time he won four MVP awards and never finished lower than 4th in the MVP voting. However, that 4th place finish following the 1965-66 season set the stage for a new face at the top.

From 1965-66 through 1967-68 Wilt Chamberlain won three consecutive MVP awards. Following the 1968-69 season Wilt did not receive any MVP votes, but thanks to the combination of his strong performance the previous three years and the gradual decline of some all-time greats (mainly Russell and Elgin Baylor) he was able to hold the title for one more year.

1970 Willis Reed .345

Willis Reed is probably the oddest name on this list, but it's not that surprising when you consider:

Abdul-Jabbar was named the Rookie of the Year following the 1969-70 season, then followed that up with the first of his record six MVP awards in 1970-71. Kareem stayed on top for five years, let Bob McAdoo take over for one year, then took over the top spot for five more years.

1976 Bob McAdoo .440

In a three-year span starting with the 1973-74 season McAdoo finished 2nd, 1st, and 2nd in the MVP voting, so I think it's reasonable to conclude that at that time he was viewed by more than just a few people as the best player in the game.

Abdul-Jabbar's success in the MVP voting is astonishing. Starting with his rookie season, Abdul-Jabbar finished in the top ten for 17 (!) consecutive seasons, including 15 top five finishes.

1982 Larry Bird .462

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were both rookies during the 1979-80 season (Bird was the Rookie of the Year), and the two superstars dominated for most of the next decade. Bird was the first to hold the title of best player, lost it for one year, then got it back for five more years.

1983 Moses Malone .657

Moses Malone should probably be listed instead of Larry Bird above, but that's neither here nor there. Following the 1982-83 season Moses won the last of his three MVP awards. Combine that with the Philadelphia 76ers great season (they went 65-17 during the regular season and won the NBA championship in "fo-fi-fo") and I think it's clear that Moses was probably regarded at that time as the best player in the NBA.

Bird had a remarkable run in the MVP voting. He followed up three consecutive 2nd place finishes from 1980-81 to 1982-83 with three consecutive MVP awards from 1983-84 to 1985-86. Just for good measure, Bird finished 3rd following the 1986-87 season and 2nd following the 1987-88 season. But Larry Legend missed all but six games of the 1988-89 season with an injury, and thus he could no longer hold off Magic.

1989 Magic Johnson .722
1990 Magic Johnson .734

The two years above came at the end of a run of three MVP awards in four years for Magic. The 1991 NBA Finals marked the passing of the torch, though, as Magic's Lakers lost in five games to the Chicago Bulls and the heir to the throne, Michael Jordan.

Jordan stayed on top for three years (winning two MVP awards), took a sabbatical to play baseball, then ascended to the top for two more years.

1994 Hakeem Olajuwon .551

While Jordan was goofing around with the Birmingham Barons, Hakeem Olajuwon's Houston Rockets won back-to-back NBA titles. Hakeem won his only MVP award following the 1993-94 season, but he relinquished the top ranking to another Western Conference center in 1995.

1995 David Robinson .602
1996 David Robinson .609

From 1993-94 through 1995-96, David Robinson had three of the greatest seasons in modern NBA history. The Admiral finished 2nd in the MVP voting following the 1993-94 and 1995-96 seasons and won the MVP award following the 1994-95 season. That second place finish in 1995-96 was to Jordan, who came back to the Bulls late in the 1994-95 season. Had Jordan not left the NBA to play baseball, it is likely that he would have stayed at the top of the charts for eight consecutive years.

1997 Michael Jordan .631
1998 Michael Jordan .822

Jordan retired for the second time following the 1997-98 season, making room at the summit for the player whose team the Bulls had vanquished in the 1998 Finals, Karl Malone.

Shaq's 1999-00 season was amazing, probably one of the five greatest seasons in modern NBA history. That combined with another great campaign in 2000-01 pushed the big fella to the top of the list, albeit for just one year.

(Funny thing about Shaq: I have heard many people complain that Shaq has been "robbed" of more MVP awards than any other player. I find this to be a stretch. In fact, I believe that the only season that Shaq should have won the award but did not was the 2000-01 season, when he lost to Allen Iverson.)

Tim Duncan in these four years: two MVP awards, one 2nd place finish, one 4th place finish, two NBA championships, two NBA Finals MVP awards.

2006 Steve Nash .548
2007 Steve Nash .704

There have been way too many words written about Steve Nash's back-to-back MVP awards following the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons, and I'm not about to step into that briar patch. Let me just say this: Nash finished 1st, 1st, and 2nd in the MVP voting in consecutive years, so there must have been more than a handful of people who thought he was the best player in the NBA.

So what have we learend? Well, in this time period there were 16 different players who held the title of best player in the NBA:

While Abdul-Jabbar may not be the greatest player in NBA history (then again, he may be), I think it's fairly obvious that he was the most consistently great player. Had McAdoo not taken over the top spot for one year in 1976, Abdul-Jabbar would have been rated as the best player in the game for 11 consecutive seasons.

Nine of the players on the list above are in the Hall of Fame: Abdul-Jabbar, Russell, Bird, Chamberlain, Johnson, Moses Malone, McAdoo, Pettit, and Reed.

Four more players will be elected to the Hall of Fame within the next three years: Olajuwon in 2008; Jordan and Robinson in 2009; and Karl Malone in 2010.

The three remaining players (Duncan, Nash, and O'Neal) are active and will surely make the Hall of Fame when they are eligible.

I don't necessarily agree with all of the selections made above, but then again I think most of the choices are solid. There are, of course, many ways we could tweak this: use more years, use fewer years, change the weights, use something like Win Shares rather than MVP award shares, etc. But part of the beauty of this is that there is no "right" answer, and whatever analytic approach we take will yield results that seem strange to someone.

Finally, after months and months of programming, I am pleased to announce the reboot of Basketball-Reference.com. What's new? I'm glad you asked:

Current season statsThe stats will now be updated on a daily basis. Everything will be updated: player pages, team pages, league pages, leader pages, etc. (XML Team is providing the current season stats.)

Sortable tablesAlmost all of the stat tables are now sortable. Just click on the column headings with the red text to sort the tables. I think you'll find this feature to be incredibly useful. For example, you can now look at a player's game log and quickly find their highest-scoring game, the game where they had the most turnovers, etc. Most tables can also be converted to CSV (comma-seaprated values) and PRE (preformatted text) formats.

More leader boardsLeader boards have been expanded to include season, career, active, yearly, and game leaders for the regular season and playoffs. (Game leaders are since the 1986-87 regular season and 1996 playoffs.)

More fun stuffSee which players share your birthday, or which players attended high school in your home state, or which players attended your favorite college. Want to know who had a big game last night? Check out the daily leaders.

With all of this good comes a little bad, most of it temporary:

The Full Court tools (player stats search, player comparison machine, etc.) need to be modified, so they won't be working right for a few days. This is the first project on my to-do list for this week.

The WNBA, NBDL, and NCAAM sections are down temporarily, but they will be back shortly.

The similarity scores on the player pages will be gone for a bit, but they will return in time.

Some links have changed.

Given the enormity of this project, I'm sure that there are going to be some wrinkles that need to be ironed out. I've turned on commenting for this post, so if you have any comments or questions about the reboot, please post them here or use the site's feedback submission form.

I haven't been doing much on the basketball front lately because I have been working on a huge project for Sean Forman over at Baseball-Reference.com. Today we released a new sub-site dedicated to minor league baseball named, aptly enough, minors.baseball-reference.com. The sub-site currently has the last 16 years of minor league data, but we are hoping to add more in the future. If you're a baseball fan, please take a few minutes to check it out and let me know what you think.

I thought it might be interesting to see how the news of the big deal between Boston and Minnesota affected the traffic on Kevin Garnett's player page. On July 29 Garnett's page had 100 views, a fairly typical day. On July 30 trade talk really started to heat up, and Garnett's page views jumped to 829. The next day, when the deal was all but official, Garnett's page was viewed 1234 times. On August 1, the day of the official announcement, Garnett's page views dropped to 834. Over the next four days Garnett's page had 413, 269, 201, and 221 page views, respectively. So even on a Sunday (August 5), when the site's traffic is usually light, Garnett's page was still receiving twice as many views as usual.

I don't know how many people realize this, but recently I added box scores for the 1969-70 NBA season to the site. For example, here is the box score for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's debut. (Yes, I know Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor back then, but it's easier if he has a common name throughout the site.)

The box scores were entered by a team of volunteers from the APBRmetrics message board. The box scores were obtained from old issues of The Sporting News, and unfortunately they only contained four player statistics: FG, FT, FTA, and PTS. I know there are newspapers (such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times) that ran more complete box scores for their local teams, so someday I'm sure I'll go back and fill in some of the blanks that we have.

This project is still very much in its infant stages, and at some point in the future I will be sending out a call for volunteers. However, before that can happen I am going to develop a web form that can be used to input box score data. Before the form is accepted, a check will be made to make sure that things like player points for each team add up to the team's point total. That is going to take some time for me to code, though, so don't look for it in the immediate future.

If you would like to play around with the 1969-70 box scores, I have posted them for download on the site. The files are free; all I ask is that you carefully read and follow the instructions given in the "Notices" section of the previous link.

My first attempt at maintaining a blog for this site did not go well, mainly because I wanted it to be something that just wasn't possible given my schedule. I have decided to try this again, mainly because I think it's a nice way to let readers know about new features that have been added to the site, as well as a good way to solicit user feedback.